October Update: Self-raising Containers

The latest release of the ElasticHosts platform has just been rolled out and we've got an interesting new feature, alongside some smaller improvements. However, I'm going to focus on the big ticket item, Container Auto-reboot.

As you may know, our Containers are OS Linux containers (similar to Docker's application containers, only we put an entire operating system inside). If you've not heard about them, you can read more about them here. One small constraint of this cutting-edge technology was that the container would not reboot correctly. For instance, if you were to type in the following:

$ reboot

or

$ shutdown -r now

The container would halt, but would not come back up by itself, it would require restarting in the control panel. This was obviously far from ideal, so we have fixed this by creating a new setting in the control panel. Now, if you click on your container's settings icon like so:

You should find a new option called Respawn under Advanced Options:

By ticking this box it means that your container will always reboot. That means typing in any of the following over SSH:

$ reboot
$ poweroff
$ halt
$ shutdown

Will actually cause the container to restart, not simply stop. This is very useful if you have a server that you would like to be always on, if you have clients or colleagues that only have SSH access to their container server, or if your container is going to need a lot of rebooting and you can't or don't want to log into the control panel.

Besides this new feature, our engineers have been hard at work improving the speed, efficiency and reliability of our infrastructure and control panel in general. Amongst other small changes, you will notice:

You can now pay in USD via American Express.

IP routing now refreshes sooner on server start.

Folder storage size is now calculated more quickly on the control panel.

That's it for this release. As always, we're happy to hear your feedback, just get in touch by phone or by email.